Scientific Perspectives on Christian Anthropology
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Scientific Perspectives on Christian Anthropology By Nancey Murphy Theology and science are moving toward consensus on a theory of human nature. Science promotes a view of humankind as thoroughly physical, while biblical studies and church history over the past century have also called body-soul dualism into question. About the Author: Nancey Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. Her first book, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell, 1990) won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence and a Templeton Prize for outstanding books in science and theology. She is author of seven other books, including Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics (Westview, 1997); and On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (with G.F.R. Ellis, Fortress, 1996). Her forthcoming book is titled Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge). Her research interests focus on the role of modern and postmodern philosophy in shaping Christian theology, and on relations between theology and science. She is on the Board of Directors of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, which she formerly chaired. Murphy is an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. My primary academic interest for the past few years has been theories of human nature. In connection with my lectures on this subject to various audiences I've been amazed to discover how much disagreement there is on this subject. To see if that holds true here, as well, I'm going to ask you to respond to a little survey. This is multiple choice; I'll tell you the four options, then ask for a show of hands. Survey Which of the following comes closest to your view of human nature? 1. Humans are composed of three parts; e.g., body, soul, and spirit. (trichotomism) 2. Humans are composed of two parts: (dualism) 2a. A body and a soul. 2b. A body and a mind. 3. Humans are composed of one 'part': a physical body. (physicalism) 4. Who cares? Usually I find trichotomists in the majority, followed by dualists, and only a few physicalists. The fourth option, who cares?, is really a teaser. I'll suggest that this is not in fact a question that the biblical authors cared about. This is an important issue, then, to get out on the table. It is clear that this often unnamed conflict has consequences for morality and public policy. I suspect that it lies at the heart of the current debate over the use of fetal stem cells for research. Because of the religious basis for most trichotomism and dualism there is a danger that this issue will reinforce the all-too-common perception that science and religion are intrinsic enemies. That is, while some philosophers have argued for physicalism for centuries, developments in neuroscience have brought these arguments into the public arena and these scientific developments provide strong support for physicalism. My plan this evening is to provide a historical sketch of theories of human nature in the West, followed by a glimpse of the scientific developments that support a physicalist account of human nature. I'll then comment on some of the theological issues at stake. 1. History I have failed to discover any comprehensive history of the issue with which I'm concerned here--the metaphysical make-up of the human person. One aspect that needs to be included is the history of oversimplifications of earlier history-to which I hope I am not now contributing! Nonetheless, here is my amateur historian's account. Apparently there were a variety of theories of human nature, with correlative expectations regarding death, available to the writers of the New Testament. It is widely agreed among current Christian and Jewish scholars that early Hebraic accounts of the person were holistic and physicalist, and there was no well- developed account of life after death. By Jesus' day, however, there was a lively debate as to whether or not the dead would rise at the end of time. The Hellenization of the region had begun several centuries earlier and some Jews had adopted a dualistic view of body and soul, along with a conception of the soul's survival of death. Early Gentile Christians probably held an even wider variety of views. The important fact to note is that there is no explicit teaching on the metaphysical composition of the person; 1 however, the New Testament writers did clearly emphasize the resurrection of the body (as opposed to immortality of the soul) as a guarantee of life after death. Writing to the church at Corinth, Paul's apology for the resurrection of the body met resistance from some who found it too good to be true and from others who could not understand why they should want to be encumbered again by a body once they had escaped it at death. In fact, New Testament scholar James Dunn argues that the very questions we address to the texts about the various constitutive parts of the person are foreign to biblical thought. He distinguishes between partitive and aspective understanding, the latter being the tendency of the Bible. Here one speaks of the whole person from various aspects, or in light of the person's various relationships to something else. So what appears to us as a part, for example, the body, is a term for the whole person thought of from a certain angle. 2 Biblical anthropology is concerned about relationships--to others, to the natural world, and to God. However, As Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean world and its theology was developed in conversation with a variety of philosophical and religious systems, a modified Neoplatonic account of the person came to predominate in scholarly circles. The eternal Platonic soul became (merely) immortal and there was added the expectation that it would be reunited with a body at the end of time. Augustine's account was the most influential until the later Middle Ages. A major turning point in Christian history was a result of borrowing from Muslim scholarship in the later Middle Ages. I shall return shortly to Thomas Aquinas's account of the soul. His position, based on Aristotle's conception of the soul as the form of the body, may be described as a modified rather than radical dualism. Two factors at the dawn of modernity challenged the Aristotelian account of human nature. One was the mainline Protestant Reformation's tendency to associate Aristotle with Catholicism and to return to the more Platonic elements in Augustine's thought. The other was the demise of Aristotelian metaphysics as a whole as a result of the rise of modern science. In response, philosopher René Descartes provided modern Europeans with a dualism of mind and body even more radical than Plato's—mental substance is defined over against material substance, and the body is purely mechanical. The interesting twists in this story are the result of critical church history and historical-critical biblical scholarship, beginning especially in the nineteenth century. At that time many scholars called into question the authenticity of miracle accounts in the Bible, and especially the chief miracle, the resurrection of Jesus. This led to an emphasis in theological circles on an immortal soul as the only basis for Christian hope for life after death. At the same time, though, critical scholarship made it possible to ask whether current doctrine (including doctrines regarding the soul) were in fact original Christian (and Hebraic) teaching or whether they were the result of later doctrinal development, read back into the biblical texts. It became common during the twentieth century to make a sharp distinction between original Hebraic conceptions and later Greek accretions such as body-soul dualism, and to favor the former as authentic Christian teaching. In addition, both theologians and biblical scholars in the past generation have rediscovered the centrality of the resurrection of the body in primitive Christian proclamation. While the sharp distinction between Greek and Hebraic thought was later called into question, the recognition of the importance of bodily resurrection stands as a permanent achievement. 3 2. Science and the Soul Science has affected these debates at three major points. First, the atomist revolution in physics represented the replacement of Aristotle's "hylomorphism." This was the theory that all things are composed of matter and form; form being a sort of immaterial blueprint that gives each kind of thing its typical qualities. The soul of an animal or person is its form. With the rejection of this theory it not only became impossible to understand soul as the form of the body, but the very conception of matter changed radically. Second, evolutionary biology pushed many in the direction of physicalist accounts of human nature: if animals have no souls (as moderns, beginning with Descartes, assumed) then humans must not have them either. But others argued that the concept of soul is all the more important in order to account for human distinctiveness. The thesis of this paper is that the most significant scientific development having a bearing on this long history of debates is now occurring in the cognitive-neurosciences. But first, a quick look at evolutionary biology. Already in Darwin's day the theory of evolution raised the possibility that humanity and all its works, including society and culture, could be explained in purely biological terms. If so, free will and moral responsibility seemed to be in jeopardy. To protect the dignity of humans, many relied on the mind-body (or body-soul) dualism that had been employed since the rise of modern physics to attempt to exempt human freedom and intelligence from the blind determination of natural laws.